Great Show With Surprise Big Deal Poet

Last Thursday (March 14th) I did a show for Color Me Funny.

I had booked this months ago before the premise of the show even existe and it ended up being a sort of special edition show for them… I’ll pretend that it was built around me.

21st century poetic whirlwind and champion of alt lit and memes, Steve Roggenbuck, was passing through town. Since he knew one of the CMF guys the show turned into a sort of Mashup of Comedy, Slam Poetry, and Alt Lit Readings….

It was a pretty awesome night with a really great crowd that was very open to cerebral comedy.

If I were anywhere near being a good writer or blogger I would tell you about all the folks that performed with links and stuff so you could track them down,
but since I’m not, I’m just gonna say the following and leave bracketed statement where I should expand later:

Comics Killed it.

Mike Turpin was the host and “coaxing force” for the night. He is a real believer in odd-ball comedy nights. He not afraid to step outside the box and we like that….

I went up first, and amazed the crowd with chess references and jokes about Howard Taft as a Pez Dispenser. Then a writer went up (I’ll mention about her later)
I think Brendan Krick went after that and was a sheer delight. This is my second CMF show with him. He, Mike Moran and I all did the one liner contest earlier this year, which was also organized my Mike Turpin of CMF. I like his style, he’s a good story teller. He was followed up by another writer (Ryan Mergen see below)

My friend Mike Moran killed it next. He writes for patch.com (that’s where that link will take you). He’s opened for Michael Ian Black and is doing quite well with his blog and his jokes and a podcast he does called Digression Sessions… oh and he’s in a pretty decent improv troupe as well. He was followed by another writer (see writer’s section below)

Nik Oldershaw was the feature comic (meaning second to last). I don’t know what to say about him. He’s a charming young man. He made fun of Hipster Girls and Stephen King novels. He’s a rather young bloke, and I’m jealous that I didn’t have a place to do comedy at his age… oh well, that’s another thing for another time.

now the writers…

The writers were all quite good.

*There was a female [insert name here] who was a late addition to the show, whom I enjoyed to a point. That point being the one where she reminded me alot of every other female writer of my generation that I’ve heard read in a bar. She hit that point quickly but then backed away from it and finished quite strong.

The nesxt writer was Ryan Mergen. He did some very clever stuff wherein, he strung together a bunch of phrases from similar backgrounds. One was alcoholic beverage terms and another was computer terms. Pretty cool stuff….

The next featured writer was Beach Sloth. I didn’t catch all of his readings, cause I was in the bathroom, but I enjoyed what I heard, enough to subscribe to his twitter feed and I’m already glad I did.

The main Event was Steve Roggenbuck. Who started off with a recitation from the foreward of “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, while Sigur Ros played in the background….

a) I love Sigur Ros
b) I’ve been meaning to read some Whitman

He followed this up with several readings from his own material in different forms all recited over different music which I also enjoyed….

Here comes more honesty:

I had no idea who Steve Roggenbuck was before this night. I watched about 35 seconds of one of his videos and wrote it off as another ADHD video of a dude ranting about weired stuff… it seemed almost like a parody of the video of the little girl’s self affirmation and a Kid President video (kid president is awesome, I’d do a show with him in a heartbeat). I tend to be a bit of a hater when it comes to the sub-pop-culture of the 19-25 year old set. It’s part of growing older… but I’m not so old to be set in my ways, so there is always room for me to open my mind and heart to let that stuff in….

Now that I’ve seen him perform live and read some interviews and kinda given him a chance I can actually appreciate what it is that he is doing… I’m still not sure I know exactly what he is doing, but I can appreciate it… especially after hearing him explain “flarf poetry” which is a thing I could get into… I think it’s a thing I probably could have been getting into had I known about it sooner (more on this later)….

so on that note I think I will try to explore some of the elements and aspects of such a movement in future writings (that’s what I mean by “(more on this later)”)

SOOOOOOO,

There you go, that’s a thing that happened, that I’m excited about. I’m inspired and motivated in some new directions now, so we’ll see where it takes me.

*the “female” was named Paige Gresty my characterization of her work is admittedly negligent and doesn’t give her the credit that she deserves. Rather than change what I wrote in this article with what i should have said, I will write a separate article about it and leave my mistake here as monument to my stupidity.